This
creature has a bipedal torso, roughly rat-like. Its long, narrow body is
covered with orangy scaled skin. It has a lion-like tail. The thing has
a sweaty odor. Atop the body is a crocodilian head, adorned with
spines. Two stalked orange-red eyes bespeckle a wrinkled, seamed visage.
It has tiny human-like ears. A trunk-like nose completes the portrait.
It attacks with its huge, sucker-like mouth.

Monday, March 30, 2015

Sure to get the phrase "Get your damned dirty paws off of me!" said at the gaming table over and over is the Advanced Ape class from Great Khan Games. Pay What You Want.

I know these things aren't everyone's cup of tea, but one of the things I loved about getting Dragon back in the day was the new classes. Even though they were usually "NPC" only, I usually could talk my DM into letting me play one.

I don't think I will be using this one though...I've never been a fan of apes. Or monkeys. Or dolphins, for that matter. Squeaky little bastards.

As with his past two kickstarters, Kevin Crawford has made the art used in Silent Legions freely available for people to use in their own projects for free. Pretty good deal, since honestly, art is probably the hardest thing to get.

Stock art isn't overly expensive per piece ($3-4 generally), but it adds up after a while. As Silent Legions is a Call of Cthulhu style game set in the real world as opposed to fantasy, some of the art isn't appropriate, but much of it would still work.

Friday, March 27, 2015

No. 1
is perhaps the commonest of
all, and will be referred to as
“banded mail.” Its construction
is fully dealt with in
Chapter VII. Occasionally the
lines between the alternate
crescents are shown double,
but probably that is only a
modification of this style of
defence. During the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries it was
in constant use, and did not
altogether die out for some
considerable time afterwards.
It is interesting to compare
the variations in this style
either of the actual defence
or of the modes of delineation
by the artists; the brasses of
Bacon, Creke, d’Aubernoun, Northwode, Raven, Cheyne,
&c., may be cited as examples worthy of interest in this
respect, though many more may be found upon careful
inspection

Anyway, it's got a ton of pictures of weapons and armor. Most are yellow tinted, as with a lot of old scanned books, but easily corrected.

Rules

Demi-God Race from James Mishler. Want to play a demi-god character in Labyrinth Lord? Then check this out. PWYW. It's interesting because you have to qualify for it with high ability scores rolling the 3d6 in order method. I once ran a Demi-God campaign, but everyone rolled 5d6 drop one for their ability scores.

Silent Legions from Sine Nomine is a Cthulhu mythos style OSR game. It doesn't use the traditional mythos, but takes a more toolbox do it yourself approach like most Sine Nomine games do. $19.99 and 186 paes. A little pricey for me, but already a silver seller, so the price is not stopping many

Misc

Metal Gods of Ur-Hada #3 - This is fanzine for DCC. PWYW. The White Box Omnibus - This is a collection of several recent releases from Barrel Rider Games for Swords & Wizardry White box, I think 7 in all, including 3 adventures as well as additional material. $10 and 131 pages all total (and if you bought a product from them before, he sent you a code to buy it for $8)Vacant Ritual Assembly #2 - This is fanzine for Lamentations of the Flame Princess with a lot of misc stuff. 24 pages, $2

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Although I never played Gamma World as much as D&D as a kid, some of my favorite gaming memories were of a game of it set in a theme park. While it seems like every incarnation of old school D&D has been retro-cloned over and over, there's really only one Gamma World retro-clone, Mutant Future. Fortunately, it's very well done, if not terribly well supported by material (third or first party). Still, a few products for it come out, and this one, Androids, Aliens, and Aberrations is essentially a bunch of new player races. There is also some support for Labyrinth Lord, but it's mostly a Mutant Future product.

The new races are mostly things from pop culture. The Ender and the E9000 are basically the Terminator and the T-1000 from the Terminator movies and the Evolved human which is the big headed sort often found in science fiction (that one Planet of the Apes movie where they blew up the world). There is the Grey alien from UFO lore, a Reptoid, and a Serpent Noble from the weird conspiracies of David Icke (where the world is ruled by lizard people). Lastly there are three races inspired by the Fallout series, the most interesting of which is the "Rotter", essentially a ghoul, a person who looks like they are dead but are not. Not goths, but walking, semi-rotten corpses.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

I have them on my blog-roll, so you might have seen it, but in case you didn't, a new version (for AD&D 1e) of Rob Kuntz's module, Dark Druidsis available to purchase. At $24+shipping, it's perhaps mostly for collector's, but pretty neat to have.

I've got the d20 version from Troll Lord. It's a module alright...I'll be damned if I can remember anything about it, though.

Fantastic Heroes & Witchery is about as close to the perfect OSR game as I've found, and it just got another free download for it (scroll down to the bottom of the page), two new classes for sword & planet style play

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

As a 1st edition fan, it seems pretty rare when a module comes out for it (or OSRIC), as opposed to B/X (Labyrinth Lord) or 0e (Swords & Wizardry). So I take notice when one does, in this case, The Folio 1: Beneath Roslof Keep from Art of the Genre. I had actually covered this back when it was on Kickstarter (where it was funded, albeit barely) but hadn't realized it was due out so soon. It's meant to be the first in a series of six modules, with the second on Kickstarter right now (just about funded).

At any rate, it's something of a mega-dungeon, with this module covering one level, the first (and presumably each later module covering additional levels). It's set below Roslof Keep, named after old TSR art Jim Roslof, who was quite a good artist (especially his color stuff, IMHO), but never got the adoration that other artists like Erol Otus or Dave Trampier got, or even Jeff Dee.

Sounds good, right? Well, alas, it's a bit weird. Firstly, Roslof Keep isn't really described (a smithy, inn, "trade house", and provision store get a paragraph each), with the exception of the political factions of the place. It seems that dungeon delving is almost like a team sport. There are several different houses that support dungeoneering teams, and they all compete with each other, sometimes violently.

The first in the series, Beneath Roslof Keep showed up on RPGNow the other week. I had thought the first Kickstarter covered the second module as well, but apparently not, as they are running another Kickstarter for that one.

I should have a review of the first one shortly. Basically it's not terrible, but it's got some weird conditions (the PCs need a special banner to explore the dungeon) and it's rather constrained (have to clear every room on the first level to visit the second) and is rather short (basically only 20 rooms).

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Somehow I missed this product, The Beast That Waits from Three Sages Games, using the Sword & Wizardy (Complete) Rules. It apparently came out in the summer of last year (2014) and I just didn't notice it. I'm kicking myself, because it's essentially my favorite sort of gaming product, and it's extremely well done. It is a mini-sized sandbox setting. While a sandbox, it's not simply a collection of random tables (though it has those), but a well described location that the PCs can explore and interact with more or less at their leisure.

It's centered around a small village named Graven. The place has a lot of problems, and has been increasingly cut off from the outside world. Presumably the PCs will want to reverse that by exploring the country side, dealing with the various dangers. There are four wilderness areas to explore (well, one is really farms), two dungeons, and the village itself.

Much of the wilderness is table driven, rather than a hex crawl. There are separate tables for day and night in each area, and eventually the PCs can "clear" the area by killing off (or making friends with) everything. The dungeons though are fully described and keyed. One is the keep of the ruler of the area and is relatively small, clearable in a session, while the other is a combination of mines and ruins below the mines. This is large and could very well take two or three sessions to go through.

Friday, March 13, 2015

Last summer I decided to start writing up a dungeon I had used in my game. The first level was 80 rooms. Took me about 3 months to get that first dungeon level into form from the notes I had written, but when I was done, I realized I wanted art for it. I spend about $15 on art, but realized I needed more.

So I thought, why not try publishing some smaller modules (based on dungeons I had run) and make it Pay What You Want to be able to buy stock art?

The first one was HS1 The Lost Shrine of Sirona, which I released in December. It took about 4 days to write up and lay out. I used a couple pieces of free art in it. It was short (about 4 pages) and so I put a suggested price of 50 cents.

Strangely, most the downloads came in the first month, but most of the money came in the second. And exactly 25 people donated money. The average payment was more than the suggested price, but not by much.

Undaunted, in January I released a second module. As at the time, my first had pulled in $2.50, I had to use art I scrounged up from Gutenberg. It was much longer, about 15 pages and I put a suggested price of $1.00

Curiously, again exactly 25 people still paid for it, only this time they paid a little more because of the higher suggested price. The average donation also beat the suggested price by about 10%.

For my next product, I shifted gears. I decided to release a character class. I had known Barrel Rider had released them for quite some time, and then James Mishler released his version of the Barbarian last year. So I figured, why not release the Warlock class I had been using in my game?

This time around 19 people have paid for it. The suggested price was 50 cents and the average donation has been 60 cents, which is 20% more.

Then last week, I published another module, this one somewhat longer (started working on it at the end of January) and with a suggested price of $1.50

Amazingly, this did much, much better than previous ones.

3-2015 YS1 The Outpost of the Outer Ones 231 $49.37 $32.09

37 people have donated money so far. I can only surmise it's because the module has a H.P. Lovecraft/Cthulhu mythos theme to it, even if I took a strange tack on the Mi-Go. On the other hand, it's average less than the suggested price, $1.33 per donation, or about 10% less.

This coincided with RPGNow's GM's sale, so I was able to buy a lot of art, though still not enough to commission art.

But all in all I'm pleased with what it's brought in. I do wish I had more free downloads though.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

It's on my blogroll, but it's worth repeating. Microlite 78, which is a rules lite incarnation of the 1st Edtion rules, at least in spirit, is now available to download over at the RetroRoleplaying Blog

Monday, March 9, 2015

Remember the Gold Box games from SSI? Pretty much the first licensed AD&D games that played like AD&D? Well, many of the designers and developers behind them recently formed a new company, Tactical Simulations Interactive (TSI) with plans to make a spiritual successor to those games.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

I really, really like Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures. But it sort of lacked campaign tools, which isn't a big deal for people like me (and probably you) who have dozens, if not hundreds of RPG books and such. But since this game was aimed at beginners, that was a big void. But it's been filled with Further Afield.

Just as Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures provides for an exciting evening of play with zero prep, Further Afield
offers guidelines and rules to create and run an extended campaign in
the same spirit. Now the players and gamemaster work together to create
the myths, legends, and rumors of a unique setting. Included in this
book are all the necessary tools to create your world, travel and
explore within it, defeat great and terrible adversaries, and reap the
rewards of adventures even further beyond the wall.
• Collaborative player-driven campaign creation for making your own shared sandbox.• Threat Packs for dynamic villains and dangers affecting the world beyond the village.• Helpful hints and systems for integrating new characters into existing groups.• Rules for creating magical items through your crafts, deeds, or sorcerous powers.• Four Threat Packs, including the Blighted Land and the Vengeful Wyrm.

Friday, March 6, 2015

This module took longer to make than previous ones. It's basically a dungeon crawl set in a Mi-Go base, suitable for sixth to tenth level characters (sixth for 1e, closer to 10th for 0e or B/X). It ended up being more gonzo than first planned.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

While it's currently 16 degrees F right now, Spring is finally going to show up tomorrow after a long, long, long Winter. And a decent amount of products have shown up this week as well, especially adventures.

Adventures

Birds of a Feather - From Lesser Gnome, this seems to be a high production value adventure. 21 pages, $4.99

Bloodnut Pass - The name hints at it, but it has a disclaimer that's it not for children. 17 pages, $1 from Chubby Monster Games

While apparently not officially part of the GM's Day sale (and probably a good thing, since that's only 30% off), they have joined in unofficially with 50% off their products, including their newest Advanced Adventure #32 (which I don't have yet, but will probably buy) and #26 The Witch Mounds which is really excellent for $3 each in PDF

Yoon-Suin is a campaign toolbox for fantasy games, giving you the
equipment necessary to run a sandbox campaign in your own Yoon-Suin - a
region of high adventure shrouded in ancient mysteries, opium smoke,
great luxury and opulent cruelty.
Contains: A bestiary of unique monsters, including self-mummified monks,
liquid golems, tiger-beetle men, figments, and dozens more;
a new character class, the Crab-man; a chapter for each of the major
regions of Yoon-Suin, filled with random generators to brainstorm map
contents, social groups, and more; extended rules for poisons, tea,
opium, trade, deities and so on; extended rules for exploring the Old
Town of the Yellow City, and the haunted jungles of Lahag; many
encounter tables; well over 100 pre-written adventure locales; purple
prose; 320+ pages of usefulness

About This Site

As a long time D&D fan who was lured back and then disappointed by the 5e announcement, I was thrilled to discover there was a whole bunch of people making products for old school versions of the game, either adventures and sourcebooks, or variations of the old rules.

But there was little in the way of news about new products, other than scattered comments on various message boards and sometimes not even that. So I thought I'd collect all the news I could find, as well as write the occasional review.

If you happen to have any news pertaining to OSR products, drop me a line at trancejeremy at yahoo.com